Lew Cohen is an adviser to the Completed Life Initiative, who brings expertise in the psychiatric aspects of end-of-life care and cessation of life-support. Lew’s research investigations helped found the subspecialty of renal palliative care by integrating nephrology and palliative medicine. Along with his collaborators, he conducted the first multicenter, prospective study of people who discontinued dialysis.

Recipient of the Eleanor and Thomas Hackett Memorial Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as numerous honors for his writing, he is completing his third nonfiction book for the public, Winter’s End, about a young man with Alzheimer’s who hastened his death. Lew is an Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at both Tufts University School of Medicine and the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School.